By Peter Hartcher
Updated 9 April 2018 — 5:50pm
first published 7 April 2018 — 12:05am

You can understand her frustration. More and more of Rebiya Kadeer's family have been rounded up into Chinese Communist Party re-education camps. She was once one of the richest women in China, a successful retail entrepreneur, a member of China's National People's Congress, Beijing's model member of its Uighur minority. Today she lives in exile in America accused of sedition for championing Uighur rights. Thirty-seven of her clan members, including 11 children under the age of 10, are locked up. How many of her family are free? "None," the slight, 71-year old grandmother answers matter-of-factly.

She's at liberty because, as the face of the world's Uighur ethnic minority, the US has granted her residency as protection from Chinese government repression.

Most Uighurs live in China's remote north-west province of Xinjiang. They are an ethnically Turkic people who call their land East Turkestan and practice Islam. She's been called the Muslim Dalai Lama.

More and more of the Uighur people are being penned up in the camps, and the Chinese Communist Party doesn't even bother with a legal pretext any more, Kadeer says.

She says that any Uighur in contact with the outside world, through family or merely through the internet, is liable to being put into what she calls "concentration camps".

Beijing has long practiced transmigration - relocating ethnic Han Chinese, the vast bulk of China's people, into Tibetan or regions to overpower the influence of the local ethnic groups and permanently alter the makeup of the population.

But now, says Kadeer, it has become much more intrusive. When a father is removed from a family and detained in a re-education camp, a Han Chinese man is imposed on the family and moves into the home, a stranger required to be accepted as family, according to Kadeer and her supporters.

Of the roughly 10 million Uighurs estimated to live in Xinjiang, Radio Free Asia estimates that about 120,000 are now in the internment camps. Kadeer estimates it to be closer to 1 million.

And she's frustrated because while that repression grown steady more intense, and more Orwellian, her success in calling attention to her people's plight has diminished.

The Chinese authorities may be pioneering a new totalitarianism, uniquely repressive in human history, according to a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans, Rian Thum.

"It's a mix of the North Korean aspiration for total control of thought and action," Thum told the Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, "with the racialised implementation of apartheid South Africa, and Chinese AI [artificial intelligence] and surveillance technology." Thum visited Xinjiang, where outside access is strictly controlled, last year.

Yet, unlike the Dalai Lama and his cause for Tibetan autonomy from China, Kadeer and her Uighur people are almost invisible to the outside world. "I have done my best to help the world wake up to this oppression," she tells me. "I have not succeeded. Now I am turning to one final effort. I am ready to die in a hunger strike for the sake of my people. I have nothing else left."

When she visited Australia in 2009, Kadeer caused a sensation. The Chinese government was filthy with Canberra for granting her a visa. Beijing opposed her visit, accusing her of being a "splittist" seeking independence from China and a terrorist. In fact she was seeking autonomy within Chinese sovereignty, not independence. There had been a deadly clash between Uighurs and Chinese security forces in Xinjiang, but she has always disavowed violence.

Australia's then foreign affairs minister, Stephen Smith, said Kadeer was not a terrorist; she was a private citizen and there was no reason to deny her entry.

Chinese officials tried to silence her - they demanded that the National Press Club cancel her appearance and tried to force the Melbourne International Film Festival to cancel the screening of a documentary about her life.

It all blew up into a big story. Australia's government and Australian civil society stood up to the Chinese Communist Party's bullying. Beijing stamped its foot and cancelled some official meetings with Australian diplomats but the squall soon passed.

You wouldn't know it, but Kadeer has just visited Australia again over the past few weeks. You wouldn't know it because her visit received no media coverage. Not because she was in hiding. Kadeer led protests in front of Parliament House in Canberra, the Chinese embassy and the US embassy, too, seeking attention. Nor was it because she has moderated her demands. Indeed, she is now calling for independence for the Uighurs of Xinjiang, exactly the "splittism" that Beijing always accused her of, even though her supporters say she would gladly settle for autonomy.

No, Kadeer's visit to Australia received no coverage for other reasons. One is that the tiny Uighur community in Australia, numbering only about 2,500, seems to have very limited media and advocacy capacity. But another is that Beijing has grown savvier about media management in a democracy. China's authorities have learned that ignoring her is a much more effective way of marginalising her than complaining about her, which only draws attention to her.

And the Australian government? It ignores her, too. Kadeer says that no government minister, no government backbencher, not even the lowliest desk officer from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade would agree to meet her. DFAT told her that it would try to arrange a meeting on her next visit to Australia, according to Kadeer.

"I believe they are all frightened of China," she concludes. But Labor's Michael Danby, a noted campaigner for human rights everywhere, was an MP not afraid to meet her during her visit last week.

The Chinese Communist Party tries to smear the Uighurs as all terrorists, says Danby, as a pretext for repressing them: "The Uighurs and a Turkic people in the west of China - they have no history of involvement with Islamist fundamentalism. "Their ancient culture and history seems to be being trashed like the Tibetans', against a Chinese constitution that guarantees minority rights. I think it's shameful that no one in the Australian government will talk to her, even if for diplomatic or intelligence reasons to find out what's going on."

A Kadeer supporter who lives in Sydney, Mehmet Celepci, an accredited interpreter and migration agent, says that plenty is going on and Australia's Uighur community is frightened: "Normally when we'd have a Uighur protest in Australia we'd get 10 or 20 or maybe 70 or 100 people turning up."

In the most recent led by Kadeer, about 500 came. "This time it's life and death for their family members" still living in China, Celepci says.

Kadeer plans another trip to Australia in a couple of weeks while she awaits the outcome of requests for permission for a location in the US where she can go on hunger strike. "If I die in a hunger strike, this might help to wake up the world."